First Swype-enabled smartphone coming to Verizon in the Omnia II

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

It’s easy to think that the iPhone has nailed the problem of text entry on a digital QWERTY pad. Apple’s solution certainly works elegantly enough: a combination of a responsive QWERTY digital keyboard on screen and Apple’s own excellent auto-correction means that even clumsy typers can generally rattle off quickly composed text messages with correct spelling.

But Swype thinks this method isn’t efficient. Sure, Apple’s almost got it right, but why does Apple insist upon individual taps on each digital QWERTY key? Swype’s solution is ingenuous: it makes text entry on a digital QWERTY keyboard similar to using multitouch gestures. For example, if you were going to type in the word “hello” into your phone, instead of tapping each letter individually, you’d tap h, trace a path on the keypad to e, l and o, and then lift your finger up. Swype’s auto-correction would then extrapolate the correct word from that gesture.

While Swype certainly seems like a great option for digital text entry on a touchscreen based phone, no phones currently support it natively. That’s all set to change soon, though, as the company has announced that the first Swype-enabled phone to hit the market will be Verizon’s Omnia II, to be released on December 2nd.

We’ll see if the reality of using Swype is as beautifully elegant as the video demonstration seen above, but I’m looking forward to playing with it: it may not work quite so wonderfully in actuality, but Swype certainly looks like an intriguing option to the problem of digital text entry, and certainly worth some exploration.